NOTHING HOLDS BACK the NIGHT by French Author Delphine de Vigan

Delphine de Vigan has received numerous literary awards for her writing including the Rotary Int'l & Prix des libraries.  De Vigan's powerful novel NOTHING HOLDS BACK the NIGHT, reads as a journalistic memoir of her upbringing with a mother suffering from bi-polar disorder.  To call this work a novel is misleading but to capsulize the format of this edifying work would not do it justice.  De Vigan writes with a journalistic eye and courageous candor.  She uncovers the tragic & glamorous life of her mother Lucille as a young girl and the fractious impacts it had on her & her sister.  Delphine begins with the discovery of her mother's body days after her suicide.  Delphine is compelled to examine what led to her mother's death through family interviews & diaries as she reexamines her own life.  Delphine was burdened with the torment & responsibility of having a mother who battled mental health & hospitalizations. Lucille an admired beauty, earned a substantial income which helped support her large family by modeling.  Tragically, 3 of her brothers died young; 2 by suicide.  Delphine informs us of her mother's life burdened with death, incest, depression & mania.  Lucille frequently moved herself & her girls giving them a nomadic, unconventional lifestyle.  Nonetheless, Delphine writes of mutual devotion and an overriding obligations to care for herself, her sister and her mother.  Mixed in with all the darkness we glimpse an extended & connected family living in Paris and the countryside that is both covetable and forlorn.  Reading this novel/memoir is going down a rabbit hole that provides, if not an understanding of mental illness, a vivid, troubling portrait of what it is like to grow up in a frenetic household of dysfunction.